My friend Davina Wynne-Jones has died a few weeks after celebrating her 70th birthday at Herbs for Healing, the field in Gloucestershire where she had her home and business, and where she created an Eden bursting with purpose and abundance, growing and supplying medicinal herbs.
Daughter of the garden designer Rosemary Verey, Davina grew up at Barnsley House, near Cirencester, Gloucestershire. She found her mother’s gardens both magical and inspirational. Plants remained an obsession all her life. She once said: “I never get bored. They are nature, healing and beauty; the whole plant has a magic that gets lost in pharmaceutical research.”
Informed in part through her father David Verey’s eye as an architectural historian, Davina learned to look beyond a facade, to the bare bones and to a truth. She was both inquisitive and questioning.
Home schooled, she produced her first book, about Fairford church and its windows, at the age of 11. Her first job came in 1972 at the Wilts and Glos Standard; she later studied fine arts at Falmouth School of Arts. She married Hal Wynne-Jones in 1978, and the land on the Barnsley House estate where Herbs for Healing was later established (planting began in 2004) was a wedding gift from her parents.
David had begun restoring the 11th-century Arlington Mill in Bibury in the 1960s, and Davina shared her father’s passion. The mill’s machinery had been removed during the first world war; it was replaced with pearwood workings from North Cerney mill and a Victorian cast-iron letterpress was installed. It was printing woodcuts from her mother’s old herbals – books describing the properties of plants – that partly inspired Davina’s healing vocation. Between 1985 and 1994 she and Hal lived in and ran the mill and its museum.
Another of Davina’s longstanding interests was in sacred places; stone and crop circles, barrows and tumuli. She knew all the local Cotswold mounds, tumps and burial sites. The fairy circle at the bottom of her field is a hawthorn thicket reclaimed from the top of Colnpen barrow near North Cerney. A traditional protective boundary plant, the hawthorn now lives on, reconfigured and purposeful.
In 1978 and 1981 her determination and vision helped set up Rough Hill festival in the Winterwell valley, a few miles up the Welsh Way, the ancient drovers’ thoroughfare that bisects Barnsley village. Steve Winwood, Marianne Faithfull and Ronnie Laine were among the performers. Davina recalled it as “a beautiful memory, something wonderful”.
She is survived by Hal, their daughters, Rowan and Lily, and grandson, Hugo.
